Apparently stung by the net effect of sparodic blogs reporting, in combination of mock and irritation, meetings with Larouche card-table deployments, LPAC has stuck this report — a distillation of some scattered comments into something of a rallying call. It is… funny, in that moribud way all of these things tend to be funny.
Generation that Fought the Nazis: LaRouche Is Right on Obama!
July 1, 2009 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche’s webcast call to arms on fighting Barack Obama’s Nazi policy on medical treatment, profoundly touched the souls of his generation—those who fought in World War II, or lived through it. But many boomers and younger people were protective of Obamamania, and fearful of what their “friends” and peers will think about calling Obama’s plan “Nazi.”
Among the older people, whether it was those who attended the Washington-area meeting where LaRouche spoke, the regional meetings, or watched it on the web, or learned about it in the field, there was a powerful response. At a literature table in the New Jersey region, an older woman was at our literature table, getting briefed on the LPAC fight, and looking at our signs on Obama and Hitler. She looked over the LPAC literature, and exclaimed, “You’re right, his policy is Nazi.” Then she pulled up her shirtsleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm, put there when she was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland at the age of 9.
At the Washington, DC-area event, an Italian-American man from Philadelphia, said, “Lyn has to win. I know, I lived under Mussolini. Lyn is right.” Two men in their 80s had the same response. One, at a field site in Los Angeles said, referring to Obama and the Administration, “I’m 80 years old. They’re out to kill me!” Another World War II veteran, attending the New Jersey office showing of the webcast, said, “I’m in trouble … I’m over 80 … they want to be rid of people like me.” In Chicago, a 79-year-old man, who had retreated into religion from politics, listened by phone to Lyn’s webcast, and later said, “That speech should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country! What he said about the British is absolutely true! In fact, everything he said is true! He’s the smartest man in the world!!”
Hm. Frankly, they could play the “Current events remind person alive during WW2 of Nazi Germany” game since at least Nixon, probably before. A note to the family of the elderly persons referenced in this item: it may be time to take over some of their financial decisions.
Granted, if one cares one probably has read these things, but I draw your attention to the factnet posts of Hylozoic Hedgehog under the “Old Mole Files” and the “New Mole Files”. The “Old Mole Files” plows through the weeds regarding something I have no real idea, and the Larouche takeover of the “CODE” publication, as well placing various actors onto the scene. “The New Mole Files”: I have a confession to make here. I am actually a little underwhelmed by it. Perhaps this effect will change when I read (after a few posts pile up) posts regarding “Mop Up”, but my basic reaction is “Tell me something I don’t know.” Which shouldn’t be my reaction (he’s told me something I didn’t know with the “Old Mole Files”, after all), except I gather part of the purpose here is carrying on an argument against Dennis King (”quit lying” about “Larouche’s ideological orientation”), such as I’m left with the belief that it promised more than it delivered on that score.
I assume this was the purpose of putting in bold type and adding a paranthetical “emphasis added” to the phrase in Larouche’s stated purpose of finding “Leninist Boomers”. Of course, a secondary purpose is to put the context of the org as being a forty year history of yanking a small cadre of “Leninist Boomers” around in various fashions, which I guess would argue for the cult orientation over any ideological consideration.
To review how the “left” and “right” strait-jacket is reconciled, here are two quotations from Tim Wohlforth in his memoir The Prophet’s Children:
“In fact it is quite remarkable how the ‘new’ Larouche organizes his followers in a Leninist cadre fashion, drives them with a vision of the historic tasks and the necessity of their actions and successfully reaches layers of society with “transitionl” slogans that appeal to economic needs or old prejudices.”
“The Larouchites began mouthing anti-Semitic phraseology, promoting the nuclear program and arms industry, advocating a Star Wars defense, and baiting gay people. The old Trotskyite, a member of my own small organization, had emerged as a Fascist!”
I hesitate to say Wohlforth over-stepped his bounds in referring to various mainstream causes of the 1980s into the realm of “fascist”, though the “gay baiting” in particular may have the “matters of degree” on a one dimensional “left / right” spectrum. The “anti-semitic phraseology” is what remains constant. Also I wonder what “layers of society” he refers to here — surely the elderly people in the LPAC release and the similar credit fraud victims of the 1980s, and the college aged recruits, and a larger number I guess anyone who’s quoted a single line from Leon Strauss in the past eight years and talked and blamed Hitler on Prescott Bush over the past two decades.
I also go to the response to the Wall Street journal editorial of 1986 chaffing at the reference to “right wing”, with the comment that they’re ignoring that their conspiracy theories stem from a right-wing history. For the most part — immediately past the issue front which can lean either conservative or liberal — the grand conspiratorialing is at home and is undistinguishable from something available for sale in the back-page of a John Birch Society catalouge. (Or, further afield, Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight. And some perenials commence.) But not entirely? The one about Western Imperialists’s grab of Africa’s raw materials, subjecting them to third world conditions — a mainstay of the org, put into words at the end of the SNL sketch, serves as an in to various despots — strikes me as Leftist. Does it become “Rightist” by mere dent of sticking a Jewish financier and cabal behind it? (Well, that’s my crudest brush off of Chip Berlet’s “Right Woos Left” piece.)
Here is a fairly typical piece – A liberal case against Wal Mart – select paragaphs would not be out of place in an issue of, say for instance — In These Times, but the other paragraphs feature the Larouchian calling card. A conspiracy brought to you by Synarchists in league with the Imperial Rome model. It’s the mode of operation adaptable to practically any popular political cause of the past 30 years. In the case of the Wal-Mart piece, I don’t know if it’s to lure a recruit from a general liberal arena, have the wind at the back of a Larouchie as s/he holds forth on a street corner, or to make it roll onto a like-minded website or two.
Another quotation from Wohlforth brings something to mind on what I regard as the nature of the cult. I can’t find it immediately — it’s somewhere in this book. Something to do with “we may never know what turned Larouche against the Left”. I found it a misguided quotation.
Trotskyites are famous for their intercessine fights and references to every other Trotskyite organization as “Reactionary Deviants”. Indeed, it’s the only thing they’re famous for. To look through the Spartacist publications from the 1960s into the 1980s (and it’s been over a year since I’ve done so) was to provide me the one essential context for the org. The image which comes to mind was a photograph of Tim Wohlforth protesting The War with the sign “Troops Home Now”, and the accompanying admonishment that the Wohlforthites “adopted a purely Nationalist line” whereas the Spartacists proudly fought on behalf of the Viet-Cong. The other image is a cover of a grubby and dirty mine striker, iconic image I’m pretty sure, and I don’t know my history of the Second or Third International well enough to locate it to Poland or the Ukraine. Surely the Spartacists hawking these publications on a street corner held much in common with the rough and tumble striker
So Larouche left that venue — imaginary though it may be, called forth the “Fifth International” where he has played that game of historical mission on a larger scale. Wohlforth is gone; Newton is in! (Though, oddly enough, Mark Rudd remains in.) Revolutionary Workers strikes are gone; Benajamin Franklin’s “youth movement” is in! Such was where the “Leninist Boomers” were yanked about. [Incidentally, I believe the Fifth International has failed and been utterly corrupted, and will thus be forming the Sixth International.]
As for the Nazis? Well, we can move further afield from King, who — cavalier about posting a photograph of the man’s arms out-stretched though he may be (ironically transforming Larouche into an ordinary politician) in his defense titled his book “The New American Fascism”, not “New American Nazism”. I have no opinion on Plato and his “Golden Souls”, except that Plato’s Republic has served as the rationalization for a number of despots. I have no opinion on Nazi Space swirls, except to point to Von Braunn’s courtship. And I’m hard pressed to figure out what else the org’s effect, outside its orbit of spending membership’s lives [Jeremiah Duggan the extreme example], has been besides stirring this conspiratorial items into public discourse.
Across the spectrum. On the far edge you have European’s “researchers” and “reporters” who insist to him that they know they all read Mein Kampf and sit before portraits of Hitler. An edge inward and you have this admitted tin-foil hat wearer’s conspiracy theory that the org was financed by fleeing Nazis’ Gold and there we have Dave Emory’s program which sticks him in as part of that “Underground Reich” (though, Emory would also hold forth about Prescott Bush on that score.)